Agricultural research in Canada needs champions, and you can be one.With Parliament in summer recess, politicians will be in their home ridings attending barbecues and field days.These will be ideal opportunities for farmers to buttonhole their representative and tell them that agricultural research funding has fallen so far behind that it will take a huge commitment just to get it back to 1994 levels.And yet it is one of the best business support programs going, with every dollar invested in agricultural research paying back $10 to the national economy.Last January a coalition of farm groups, including the Grain Growers of Canada, Grain Farmers of Ontario, Fédération des producteurs de culture commerciales du Québec and the Atlantic Grains Council was created to lobby for agricultural research.Farm groups often squabble among themselves over the direction of agriculture policy but this is a critical issue generating rare widespread support.No wonder. Funding for agronomic research has fallen 40 percent since 1994 after adjusting for inflation.It would require an increase of $26 million per year for 10 years just to get funding back where it was 16 years ago.A commitment is needed to help keep Canada in the game against producers in other countries who enjoy the benefits of stronger research funding.It is not right, as governments of all political stripes are fond of doing, to take the same research money as the year before, give it a new program name and announce it in the budget as a renewed commitment to farmers. Then that same money is reannounced repeatedly as it is doled out to individual projects.Meanwhile, important agronomic research scrapes by, if at all, on a shoestring budget and scientists approach retirement with no plan to find replacements who will carry the torch.The big agri-corporations fund research, but mostly in breeding and only in large-acreage crops dominated by hybrid seed, like corn, soybeans and canola, where they can profit. No company would work on something like companion cropping because there is no way to commercialize and profit from it.Only public sector researchers do the work needed to optimize input use to cut costs of production and breed important but small acreage crops like oats, flax, pulses and special crops.Yet these are among the most profitable crops that Canadian farmers grow.It is important that food production become more efficient globally so that we can sustainably feed the world’s growing population.And it is important for Canada that her farmers remain among the most efficient and competitive in the world, capitalizing on the opportunities that growing food demand present.Other countries also see that opportunity and are investing. They include not just our traditional competitors such as the United States and Australia, but also new players such as Russia, which has vast areas of underused land and a stated intention of becoming more competitive in important food importing countries in Asia.That is why it is important to talk to your MP to stress that agricultural research funding is important to you as their constituent.There is a near endless list of issues vying for budgetary support. The relative few that get funding do so because there is demonstrated voter support and because they are championed within government by MPs whose constituents have urged them to act.And while you are at it, talk with your fellow producers about the importance of supporting farmer-funded research checkoff programs, because if farmers don’t support research, they weaken their case for federal support.
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